‘I was always three dimensional, not two dimensional. I felt like I was in the Truman Show.’

'It was just a feeling; people around seemed to be cardboard cutouts. I had this other third dimension, feeling emotion or something, that other people didn’t seem to have. A sensitiveness. Not a judgement, just an awareness. Everyone has a third dimension but when you’re young you’re not aware. Everyone existed but I had this other thing … neither good nor bad, better or worse. It was just something. I felt this from when I was quite young. I didn’t experience other peoples’ feelings.'

‘I never told people I wanted to be a priest not because I didn’t want to be a priest, but because of their reaction: all the questions, why would you want to do that, are you gay, what about marriage and celibacy, etc? Anyway, I do have a relationship: to God. It’s an on-off relationship, but we talk. Sometimes he listens.’

*

Two years ago he lay dying on the hard earth of a shanty town. As his life blood gushed out he stumbled away, trying to escape the men who had just shot him at point blank range.

"The third shot was like a fist going right up into my body. I really felt that," says the mild-mannered Belfast priest with a shudder. He pauses for a moment, licking his lips.

"I felt so alone … abandoned," states Father Kieran Creagh, as he remembers the night in February 2007, when a criminal gang attacked his South African hospice.

"They just rang the bell outside in the courtyard and I thought, 'oh, something must have happened in one of the wards'. I didn't realise these guys were inside. I opened the door … and that's when they grabbed me."

Leratong – the name means "place of love" in one of the six local languages spoken here – had been set up by Father Creagh in 2004, a single-minded effort to help tackle the massive HIV/AIDS crisis crushing the nation. With its hospice beds, drug clinic and creche, it was at the physical and spiritual heart of the community.

A member of the Passionist religious order, Creagh had spent over a decade seeing his congregation succumb to the deadly disease. In the overcrowded, poverty-stricken township of Atteridgeville, about an hour west of the capital Pretoria, he had watched as old men lay dying in filthy shacks, unable to move; attended by wives who were scarcely less sick.

He felt passionately about bringing dignity to the dying: it was his vision and determination, despite funding problems, political obstructions and the South African government's refusal to provide anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), that had led to Leratong's birth.

The irony was that he was now facing the end of his own, most extraordinary, life.